A report by the National Cyber Security Partnership (NCSP) in the United States says that software developers of Indian origin make fewer errors per line of software code than their US counterparts.

The NCSP is composed of the U.S. government in alliance with various U.S. companies to counter the threat that their software applications face from hackers and crackers all over the world.

The report attributes this accuracy to the high quality university education in software design that’s available in India.

However, this is not to say that the Indians are the best in the world: the Japanese make fewer errors than any other nationality. The slightly higher rates of committing mistakes may be attributed, at least in part, to the fact that Indian IT firms are usually involved in a lot of work that has been outsourced keeping in mind the time saved; more often than not they are under pressure to deliver work in half the time it otherwise would take.
Another study undertaken in December last year bears this out. For every 100,000 lines of code churned out, the Japanese made only 2 mistakes. “Europe and other nations” made 23, while India made 26. In the United States, however, programmers committed as many as 40 mistakes for every 100,000 lines of code.

The study also examined the productivity across various countries. It examined the number of lines of code per programmer per month, and found out that while India showed a mere 209, the U.S. output stood at 270. Across the rest of the world the figure stood at 436. The Japanese, as usual, were way ahead of the pack, with the average programmer writing out a solid 460 lines of code every month.

It must be noted, however, that the study did not take into account the different work being done in these places.